breaking borderlines by blogging brazenly

3 years later

Tonight I came across something I’d typed up all the way back in 2013, pre-diagnosis:

Here is my confession: I am an addict. I am seventeen again, lit on fire from the inside. Punch-drunk. Giddy. There is more of you running through my veins than blood. I shatter a little whenever you disappear on me.

This is stupid. I don’t want to be seventeen again. Seventeen is vulnerability, fragility. Seventeen is sinking underwater, lost at sea. This is stupid. But what can I say? I’ve always had foolishness written along my very bones.

I don’t want to be in love with you. I think too much and you think too little, and maybe that’s why I always wind up being the broken one. I feel too much. I take one step into a river and it turns abruptly into an ocean. I don’t so much fall in love as plunge headfirst into it. My thoughts skitter. I want to find the switch that can shut my brain off. There is a little voice in my head saying I told you so, I told you so. I always knew you’d be my undoing. I think too much I feel too much I miss you. Clock ticks, clock breaks. My thoughts are running wild — I can picture them, scattering across a great African plain. I am strung out. I am a knot you unravel carelessly. I am waiting for something that doesn’t come. This is stupid. I was never lonely before I met you. What am I waiting for?

I see the ghost of you everywhere. It was stupid of me to ever consider the possibility of getting away from you, I see that now. You are the kind of boy people write songs about, the kind that comes into your life just to rewrite everything you thought you knew. To draw a simple line separating before and after. Before you. After you. Nothing else really matters. Nobody else really matters. Nobody else will come close.

I am turning into someone I don’t like. I am an empty house. I wouldn’t love me, either; I really don’t know why I would expect anyone else to. Too broken. Too needy, desperate; too goddamn clingy. I have no in between, no neutrality. I feel all or nothing. I feel everything. Neediness — so unattractive. I scowl at myself in the mirror. Stop it. I take refuge behind my armor of sharp, cool words. I play the part of an ice-cold bitch: act like it long enough, and you can become it. I lock my vulnerability up, wish away the key. I do not need you. I do not want you. I set fire to the bridge and watch it burn.

Swallow. I am a house of cards. Smile. I can pretend. How long will it take before you figure out that there is a hole inside of me? I run from good things in my life. I destroy them before they can destroy me. Nothing gold can stay. Nothing good can stay. I am leaving before I can be left. How long will it take before you figure that out? How long will it take before you leave?

It’s strange, checking all the boxes: the all-or-nothing, the clinginess, the sickening feeling of being empty, the self-hatred, the obsession with being left. All signs that had been laid out in front of me right from the very beginning, before I’d managed to see them clearly.

It does feel a little fatalistic, though. That 3 years on, I can picture myself writing the exact same thing. Scratch that, I am still constantly writing similar things. I haven’t changed that much, I guess.

Still, on the bright side — I did get away from him. And I found someone else who, thankfully, doesn’t come close. I suppose that’s a nice reminder that feelings are not always facts.